A Year or More: The High Cost of Long-Term Unemployment

Pew's Fiscal Analysis Initiative released statistics showing that as of August 2010, 4.4 million people—roughly the population of Louisiana—had been out of work for a year or more; an increase of nearly 30 percent since December 2009. In an update to the April 2010 report, A Year or More: The High Cost of Long-Term Unemployment, researchers also found that federal spending on unemployment benefits will total $160 billion in fiscal year 2010.

Pew's analysis of the latest data from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the problem has grown worse in the months since: In August 2010, 30 percent of the 14.8 million Americans who were unemployed had been jobless for a year or more. That translates into more than 4.4 million people, roughly equivalent to the population of Louisiana.